Wikipedia talk:Centralized discussion/Sports results

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Comment[edit]

I think it's helpful to separate out the general question from the question of what to do with all the 2005 English cricket season articles. The main question is phrased in such a way that I think most people would agree to delete such articles. But the cricket authors are trying to do something rather different from what the main discussion implies, and I don't think people have realised that. As I argued below, I think they should be allowed to continue it for the rest of the season, although not setting a precedent. Stephen Turner 16:31, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also think this is helpful - I would possibly agree with the main thing we are discussing, that individual games are below the notability limit, but I don't want to see that used as a means of deleting heaps of potentially useful and relevant content which could easily be merged into more substantial articles. Sam Vimes 19:13, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The case against inclusion[edit]

I created this discussion to move the cricket match articles discussion out of AfD and to a centralized place, hopefully to reach a consensus and a policy.

In summary, I do not believe that reports of routine, non-championship sporting events are suitable for Wikipedia articles. There are tens of thousands of organized sporting events played every year, all over the world, and only a very few of them are notable in an encyclopedic sense. These include championships and matches/games where notable events occur, as well as events of global interest which are played only annually or less often, like the FIFA World Cup or the Tour de France.

Practically all the others -- like league cricket matches, football games, baseball games, etc. -- are properly the province of media which are designed for listing and collecting sports results. Wikipedia is not a daily newspaper or news/sports web site. It is not an almanac of cricket or any other sport. The reports of the type recently on AfD would be appropriate for a special-purpose web site, or a SportsWiki, or a CricketWiki, or something similar, but given the encyclopedic aim, and limited resources, on Wikipedia they're just clutter.

I remain completely unconvinced that Wikipedia is a good place for routine sports results. -- MCB 03:25, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I am against articles on individual regular games, although I am for articles on sporting events. Super Bowl XXXVIII, for instance, would qualify as a game that is an event in of itself, but said article includes the scores of the playoff games as well as the big match. But, say, New England Patriots v. Carolina Panthers, September 18, 2005 is not worthy of an article to me, because it's just a regular season game and it could be summed up, if it matters, in the 2005 NFL season article. The same applies to cricket, ice and field hockey, football, every sport I can imagine. There are exceptions to every rule (I think All-Star Games are worthy of articles despite just being single games), but it's a fairly loose criteria that I can go on. Lord Bob 05:23, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I can agree in principle (though it puzzles me why, when episodes of a TV show are notable) - but the problem is that if people decide to delete the content now, there's a heck of a lot of work that just goes AWOL, and the season reviews of the 2005 English cricket season will basically go to pot. So if it is possible to leave the cricket articles for two weeks (possibly retracting the delete votes on the grounds that "these articles will be merged later on, and this does not form a consensus for future sports articles"?), then they will be merged and the individual articles deleted from sight, and new such articles will be created in user space. OK? Sam Vimes 05:47, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Sam, if we were to include our most off-hand, obscure articles as precedents of what constitutes notability, we could include literally anything. And I mean everything. A word like glomp (anime community slang) would never get in as a Wikipedia article if it wasn't used online. And that's a sign that our editors need to get their heads out of their own community duckponds, not that we should start including Canadian hockey player jargon or adolescent slang for hugging in Sindhi.
I really don't see a problem with deleting content that shouldn't be here in the first place. We have hundreds of thousands of articles about proper subjects to worry about, and adding to that burden by making us the custodians of whatever sportscruft people happen to include is unacceptable. Massively popular and widely publicized sporting events like the the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl I can agree to. Major events like these can have articles of their own, but any single match is to me an automatic delete vote. Any sports match worth having a separate article on is part of a bigger picture. Either it's a part of a tournament, in which case it should be merged with the tournament article, or if it's a particularly important match to any of the teams involved, it should be noted in the team article. All individual sport matches should be valid CSDs since Wikipediai s not a sports almanac.
Peter Isotalo 11:46, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I'm not convinced individual television episodes are notable either, although I don't feel strongly about it (I'm still pondering that). That said, there is a difference in terms of sheer numbers: 162 × 30 = 4,860 regular season Major League Baseball games per season, for instance, although that's an extreme example. There are, however, still 2,460 NHL and NBA games per season and even 512 NFL games per season. By comparison, there were 21 Season Two episodes of Family Guy. I can't comment on non-North American sports since I don't know their schedules as well, but I doubt the pattern is significantly different. Lord Bob 16:01, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There are, however, quite a significant number of notable TV shows. The amount of matches in the 2005 English cricket season, btw, is something in the region of 500 (there's 538 in the category, but that includes all the pages the content is transcluded into). And let me just give a hypothetical use for this content. Say I wanted to write an article about an up and coming English spin bowler, Monty Panesar. I could then go to Cricinfo and search up all the matches he has played, or I could get his most important performances by looking up the Northamptonshire County Cricket Club in 2005 page. And you want to remove that resource. Thank you very much, Sam Vimes 16:20, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There are lots of television shows, yes, but there are lots of sports leagues, too. Even small professional sports leagues like the Canadian Football League (nine teams) have more games in a season than almost any television show has episodes in a season, and large sports leagues like, again, Major League Baseball or the NHL have many multiples more games in a season than television shows have episodes in a season. Besides, as you yourself admit, there are other resources such as Cricinfo for cricket information, HockeyDB for ice hockey information, and about a thousand baseball sites. I've written articles on athletes, and I didn't need Wikipedia to give me information on what they've done because the information is out there and extremely easy to get. In short: you're welcome. Lord Bob 16:35, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Um, right. So the argument is: "The information exists elsewhere, hence we don't need it on WP." Enjoy listing every single one of the 720,000 articles on WP for deletion, based on that argument. Sports are important to people, just as music and TV are, hence it is notable (with the low notability standards that are in place and firmly wrested in policy - there is a reason Wiki is not paper is listed at the top of WP:NOT), and the information verifiable. Which is the only criteria for inclusion on WP. Sam Vimes 16:43, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No, my argument was "The information exists and is easy to get elsewhere, therefore 'I want the information over here!' is not a reason to have it on WP". You don't need to tell me sports are notable. I like sports. I write about sports, and have an article on CFL quarterback Jason Maas about half-done on my flash memory drive. But I don't think individual regular-season games, even for top-flight competition, are notable enough to have their own articles. Season summaries are wonderful things. Heck, I wouldn't even object to an article containing all the results for that year. But an article on each game is just too much. Lord Bob 16:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think we can almost agree, then. See my first compromise attempt above. Sam Vimes 16:59, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with what Peter said above. While these contributions are good, they're not necessarily appropriate for an encyclopedia; teams and players are notable and encyclopedic; individual regular-season matches are not. If they are particularly extraordinary, it's certainly worth mentioning the game in an article like 2005 in baseball or its equivalents for other sports (as R. fiend calls it, a "smerge"). Championship games are televised worldwide to an audience undoubtedly in the tens of millions, and they tend to be remembered much more in the history of the sport. I don't think that it's necessary to debate whether or not the World Cup, Stanley Cup, World Series, NBA Finals, or championship matches in other sports should be included as articles (though note that championships that are multiple games between the two teams, such as the Stanley Cup and the World Series, are given one article per series rather than one article per game; see 2003 World Series). Regular-season matches, by and large, however, are better suited for Wikinews and should be transwikied there. --Idont Havaname 14:14, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed this post by jguk over at one of the match AfDs. I was pretty stunned by this claim:
Effectively WP:Cricket is creating an almanack that will, in time, exceed Wisden in depth (though probably not renown).
To me this feels like rewriting policy, not just reinterpreting it. It's the choice of "almanac" that worries me the most, because this is not much different from creating any type of internal database. It's very obviously intended solely cricket fans and not because it's encyclopedic.
Peter Isotalo 21:08, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
What part of the policy does it violate? It wouldn't happen to be the one that says The length, depth, and breadth of articles in Wikipedia is virtually infinite. by any chance? Sam Vimes 21:16, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know which specific policy that it violates, but it would seemingly rewrite some AfD precedents. Having articles on individual sporting matches is the sports equivalent of fancruft; only serious fans of those particular sports and teams care about it: "Fancruft is a term referring to detailed information that people (often characterised as fans of the subject in question) add to Wikipedia. People who oppose the inclusion of this information often claim that it is of minimal interest to non-fans." We could probably add the end results of our discussion here to the fancruft article as well. --Idont Havaname 00:36, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Doesn't Wikipedia:Fancruft also state:
  • Much encyclopedic material is of interest only to enthusiasts of a particular subject
Which kind of proves the point that we can throw these clauses around forever. And note that AFD precedents have changed, as per the Pokemon test, something I've noticed used on AFD and attempted to delineate. Hiding talk 11:12, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Much of the basis of the controversy, I think, is whether it is a good idea for Wikipedia to become any sort of almanac, that is, "a comprehensive presentation of statististical and descriptive data". In the same sense that encyclopedias are not dictionaries, encyclopedias are not almanacs. It is not encyclopedic to record every single event of a sports season. The proponents of inclusion argue that the individual match articles are valuable because they are part of a process yielding a single article for the season. Besides cluttering the article space in the meantime, I would respond that that argument is irrelevant, because the resulting merged material itself -- informal, journalistic accounts of every single match -- is not appropriate for Wikipedia. I am not a hater of sports, I am a sports fan myself of U.S. baseball and football and ice hockey. (I even know the basics of, and enjoy watching, cricket.) But I don't think Wikipedia should attempt to be an almanac for those sports, and the fans who keep up things like the 2005 NFL season article have wisely chosen not to include accounts of every single game. -- MCB 23:39, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • Agreed, the merged article would not be encyclopedic, except by summarizing: removing a lot of information, and bringing in appropriate summaries from outside sources to indicate the notable opinions about the season as a whole. In other words, the article for the whole season would have to be re-sourced and effectively rewritten, anyway, what function do the individual game articles serve in this process? Why not just subst all these little game pages into one big temporary page (like an author's user page) right now, and delete all the individual game articles? --Mysidia (talk) 01:38, 22 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • What purpose would that serve? For a start, if we were going to subst anywhere, it would be in articles like Northamptonshire County Cricket Club in 2005. Otherwise you are wrecking a decent, if slightly disentangled, encyclopedia article for no apparent reason. As mentioned below, the match summaries may potentially have uses in biographical or journalistic research, and it's a part of the team's history. And as for the 2005 NFL season, I find it baffling that the individual results are recorded on Current sports events, but not on the seasonal page or a split-off page! Sam Vimes 06:37, 22 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • To me an encyclopedia article implies some level of summarisation, analysis, overview and is not a record of ephemeral events.

So the raw data that goes into that is not an article in its own right. It might be appropriate to create the main season's page immediately to remind everyone that that's what we're working towards, but have subpages for the individual events (with the intention of subsequently removing those that are not notable in retrospect). Dlyons493 12:31, 23 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Individual sports matches are not encyclopedic with a very few exceptions. They are news material, not encyclopedia's. They are unmantainable: there are at least thousands of matches, and other such sports events, of top national/worldwide level competitions and of notable sports every week. Every day?...
    As to the cricket matches itself I've came across them some time ago. They are well written indeed and were hard work. Their authors should be given a fair amount of time to copy them somewhere else, wikicities maybe, before being deleted. A normal encyclopedia would have one article on cricket, period. WP not being paper means, as I see it, that one article per season, one per team, one for each main tactical and strategical detail of the sport have their place here, one for some main players... But definately not every match. WP is not paper but it ain't infinite either, neither physically nor in human resources. Nabla 01:40, 25 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikipedia is not, and never has been, intended to be a reencapsulation of the entire internet. Yet we keep getting these articles which really want to live on some sports site somewhere. I have no problems with articles on sports, or even articles which are season summaries for a league, but someone has to look after all these articles, and my guess is that the creators of most of these articles will be long-gone next year, leaving someone else to maintain them. And while Wikipedia may not be paper, it definitely is server space, screen real estate, and search engine fodder. All of these things can get chewed up by the enormous amount of grossly unencyclopedic stuff that has been being pushed past editors in the past year. It wasn't long ago that there would have been no argument whatsoever about the fate of a single-game article. (That was the time when we were still arguing over Pokemon articles. Lost that battle...) Personally, I would prefer if we could mount at least a semblance of sanity here and remember not only what Wikipedia's goals are, but what they are not. Denni☯ 04:31, 27 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I learned about the Cricket pages and this controversy when I clicked on "random article" this morning. I came here because I immediately knew the article did not belong on Wikipedia - it's not encyclopedic. My vote is speedy deletion, but would understand if someone wants to create a page for a whole season using the data or wants time to move the data into an appropriate Wiki. Jeff 16:44, 28 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete: I'm all for collecting these articles into season summaries, but having a separate article for every match is just clutter. It also sets a dangerous precident for any other kind of sporting match. I don't think the 'It's only temporary' argument holds much water either, since at best an admin would have to then go and delete all the articles once the season is over, and at worst the people maintining the articles will leave and leave the clutter behind. -Swamp Ig 09:05, 18 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that these games/matches should be included in a season summary, but a seperate page for each game/match of the regular season is bit overduing it. For example, the 2005 World Series page gives a summary of each game of the series rather than having a page for each game of the series. --Holderca1 03:09, 24 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I am strongly against having an article per match, when a season or championship article is more than enough. I admit that "anything" can be Notable, even a goal, but then we get to the extreme of having an article about a friendly match, without any repercussion, such as the Argentina v England (2005) one. Now imagine having all the matches of all the seasons of all the leagues in all the world. Is this encyclopedic? Mariano(t/c) 09:38, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with most of the arguements above. As said above, season summaries are plenty. -Haon 23:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The case for inclusion[edit]

For a start, the assertion that the matches are "non-notable" is a stretch - it's the premier competition of English cricket. A non-notable match would be a local league match between two city sides, say. These matches are well visited, some of them are even screened on TV, and unlike American sports, there are no "play-offs" - each game is almost equally as important (possibly with the exception of the C&G Trophy Final. Sam Vimes 05:47, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In my argument above, I changed (early on) the word "non-notable" to "routine, non-championship" because notability is used as a term of art in Wikipedia, and I didn't want to just assert it in a conclusionary manner. But really, what is notable about a regularly-scheduled sporting event? Yes, it is viewed (ephemerally) by a large number of people, but so are a number of scheduled, live entertainments. We do not have things like Radiohead in Montreal, August 15, 2003 or Phantom of the Opera, Her Majesty's Theatre, June 4, 1989. But when there is some special notability to the event, it is clearly worthy for inclusion, e.g., The Concert for Bangladesh. -- MCB 23:50, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

These articles are useful as a record of results, incidents etc, which can be compiled into a larger "season review" or other "bigger picture" article. Notable enough to be included, and it's not like its BJAODN or spam or misinformation, as such is better in than out :D --PopUpPirate 08:23, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OK. I must admit I'm still not quite sure what this is all supposed to achieve - is the goal to remove all results of all non-Super Bowl/NBA Finals/FA Cup final matches, and similar, or is it just supposed to remove individual articles on them? If it's the former, I object quite strongly, becuase of the following reasons.

  • Results and match reports can be written in a way which is verifiable and from a NPOV.
  • Sports results are traditionally noted and published by the media, but this does not mean that media sources have the sole right to publish them. Exaggerating for effect, Hurricane Katrina obviously cries out for an article, even though it was largely reported on by the media and probably would not get an article in a print encyclopedia. Indeed, seasonal sports results are often published in both general-interest almanacs and sports-specific almanacs, and in supplementary volumes to encyclopedias. There are also websites and books devoted to collecting such results over several seasons.
  • Such seasonal reviews, including match reports, have their uses in biographical accounts of players, journalistic research following a season, and research into a team's history.
  • The seasonal reviews do not violate WP:NOT in any significant way - while Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, the history of a team sport is clearly a worthy encyclopedic topic, and the only debatable point is how deep to dive, so to speak. This leads in to my last point:
  • Arbitrary notability standards. Not all sports have championship matches, for a start, nor does it follow automatically that a championship final is more notable and worthy of inclusion than a regular season match - in the case of English county cricket, the C & G Trophy final and Twenty20 Cup final would be the only two matches to be applicable for such treatment, but most followers of county cricket would say that those matches hold no more importance to them than a County Championship match. This would then have to be determined for each individual case on each season's talk pages - resulting in a lot of disjoint debates. And, because it is only parts of the content that is up for deletion, this can not be taken to AfD (using the example of Northamptonshire County Cricket Club in 2005 most people would recognise the encyclopedic status of a seasonal review), but would instead be the subject of edit wars. Solution? Create a non-arbitrary notability standard - such as "a major professional sports event whose result was concurrently important to x number of people" which would probably cover most of what people would want to add anyway.

As for the second interpretation, merging individual matches into seasonal reviews, I can see the merit of that, and won't argue to a great extent about that point. Sam Vimes 15:30, 22 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think everybody who wants deletion has their own goals on this, honestly. Personally, I'm in favour of the second option you list (merging them into seasonal reviews). But I'm sure there are people out there who prefer the first. That's part of the problem with dividing an argument ilke this up on the lines of include vs. delete. I'll probably start a 'the case for merging' section when I have a few minutes to write up my opinion again. Lord Bob 19:48, 22 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sport results certainly falls withint the "almanac-type" infomation mentioned in Wikipedia:What is an article, but I personally favours seasonal overviews, which are automatically, i think, encyclopedic. Circeus 02:54, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Some non-championship games eventually achieve notability because of unusual circumstances or events. See "The Play" for a perfect example. I'm sure there are many more. A total ban on including non-championship games would seem to be unreasonable; if the sport is notable, then so are its most notable games, which are not necessarily its championship games. Some championship games are downright boring. --gohlkus 22:17, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As you will see by looking at my comments above, neither I nor anyone else proposed a "total ban on non-championship games", but rather that "routine non-championship sports results" do not belong in Wikipedia. Obviously things like The Play are notable and worthy of an article; a description of a routine regular-season baseball or football game or cricket match is not. --MCB 23:37, 4 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral/mixed[edit]

I agree that individual sports events shouldn't have articles. The people writing the cricket articles claim to be doing something different, however — the articles are supposed to be temporary, as a convenient way of writing season reviews for each team and each competition without duplicating the reports of the same match in several different places. I think these reviews of the whole season are sufficiently notable to be articles, and the sub-articles should therefore be allowed to stay until the end of the season (which is very soon now).

However, I do not think that the process should be repeated in the same form next year. I think putting the articles in the main namespace was a big mistake. How was the person who just finds this one article supposed to know the whole plan? I also think that insufficiently notable articles shouldn't be in the main namespace even for a few months, and I don't like to see articles in the main namespace that are planned to be deleted. It was better when they were subpages of "2005 English cricket season", but someone objected to that for some rather weak reason to do with transclusion of subpages being allegedly forbidden.

I have another problem with the cricket articles, in that they have too much hyperbole. They read like journalism, not an encyclopaedia. But if I'm not prepared to edit them myself, maybe I shouldn't complain about that.

I'd also like to note in passing that the premise of the question contains a geographically-biased assumption. The talk of "championship events" really doesn't exist in the same way outside North America. The winner of the season is the team which finishes with the highest league position — there is no subsequent knockout phase. (There may sometimes be a second, knockout competition, but that's a completely independent competition and usually regarded as less significant).

Stephen Turner 08:39, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • Merge the lot in whatever page the creators intend to make them end up in when the article's claimed temporary status passes. It only causes a lot of unneccesary moves and merges. Just think big and start writing an article that lists all connected matches. If you write seperate entries there's bound to be duplicates. - Mgm|(talk) 08:44, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the end of season review article is the proper place for these sorts of things. However I do have a few questions. If the articles are supposed to be temporary until the main end of season article is created, why can you not create the article at the beginning of the season and add matches to it as the season progresses? Then you wouldn't have to merge all these pages at the end of the season, or have to bother about having them put up for deletion. This sounds like the obvious solution to me, is there anything wrong with this suggestion that I haven't considered? Raven4x4x 08:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  • It is - but the problem is that then we can't correct typos, language, and so on efficiently - it has to be done on the individual pages, and that's four different edits. Not a big deal, but slightly annoying, but maybe probably preferable to these incessant rows. Sam Vimes 09:03, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • To Mgm and Raven: The point is that each match appears on several different pages — at a minimum, one for each team, and one for the specific competition that they're playing in (there are several different competitions being played concurrently). By editing the match, you automatically edit all the merged pages simultaneously. I think the authors' solution is an ingenious one, although I'm also not surprised that it's aroused some opposition. Stephen Turner 10:18, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • I got nothing against the game articles existing temporarily for use in a future season article. Nothing against that at all. But can't they live in an article in userspace or something, like User:CricketFan/match summaries, out of the way of the main encyclopaedia so we don't have to worry about this and so they can be wiped out at the end of the season no-sweat-like? Lord Bob 16:38, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah. That happened originally (having them as subpages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket). Then they got moved out of Wikipedia space because mirrors didn't pick up the transclusion (that was actually the argument against it back in May - it's down in the Village pump archives) I think, however, that that might be the path of least pain. Sam Vimes 17:04, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That's an interesting problem, I wasn't aware of that. I tried to track down the archived discussion but the Village Pump is an absolute hell-hole for that kind of thing. Hrm. I still think it would be the easiest way to go, but now I have something new to think about. That's the wonderful thing about Wikipedia, nothing is ever easy. :P Lord Bob 18:34, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I moved the discussion to the transclusion pages for ease of reference. Although not that easy. See Wikipedia talk:Template namespace. I did mean to knock something up at Wikipedia:Transclusion usage in articles at some point, but never got round to it. Hiding talk 18:56, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely certain about this, so I think I'm in the "mixed feelings" camp here, which may disappoint some of my fellow WikiProject editors a little I suppose. I must admit that I don't particularly like the idea of temporary articles in the main namespace, but on the other hand that was only done because writing them in userspace stopped transclusion from working properly on the mirrors. I also accept that other sports don't have this level of detail written about them, but then how many other domestic sporting events last for more than 20 hours of playing time?

The other point is whether said articles are encyclopedic. I think that probably they aren't as standalones, but probably they are as part of a larger article. For example, I think that Worcestershire County Cricket Club in 2005 is very useful, and exactly the sort of thing that's hard to find elsewhere online (I don't know of any other free online source that has such detailed information on such matches). One further point to make is that Wisden, which the vast majority of cricket fans would consider an authoritative reference on the game, has match summaries of exactly this sort.

All this being so, I think I'd agree with those who say that the individual articles are rather out of place in the main namespace, even as a temporary measure, but also agree with those who say that the information in them is not in itself unencylopedic, and that they are therefore appropriate for Wikipedia. If the transclusion problem with user pages could be solved, then I'd say that would be the best way to go; the eventual larger articles would make Wikipedia more useful, and for me that's the clincher. Loganberry (Talk) 03:00, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What harm do they do?[edit]

Apologies for starting a new section. It seemed to be the easiest way to make a new point that has not been made before.

First question: what harm do these pages do? Is someone seriously going to come to Wikipedia, see a sports result and think "Wikipedia must be rubbish"? I think not. If there is another reason why it would be harmful, I would be glad to hear it. If the only reason is "it hasn't been done before" or "it's against policy", I say WP:IAR: these pages improve WP as a whole.

My second point is that these pages do actually fulfill the more important policies. WP:NOT is far less necessary as a policy than WP:V or WP:NOR. These pages are verifiable. Why then delete? Cricket scores are inherently easier to verify than, say, football (soccer) scores or baseball scores as the scorecard explains every bit of progress in the game. That it is not immediately comprehensible to a non-afficionado is hardly our fault.

My third point is to repeat Sam Vimes's. These articles will be merged. That is to say, before long, they will be part of a set of grander articles. This is a temporary stage. They aren't great articles in their own right, but they soon will be. Why come and attempt to disrupt a process of article creation? It would be possible to create them in user space or in the Wikipedia: namespace. But this would be highly undesirable as it would mean we have no such summary articles in the meantime.

These articles clearly improve Wikipedia's cricket coverage. Is there any reason to delete? (Envy that baseball doesn't have a similarly-committed set of fans is not a valid reason!) [[Sam Korn]] 18:39, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Regardless of what I think of the cricket game articles (I think it should be fairly self-evident by just looking up), I'm not sure it's valid to say that WP:NOR and WP:V are somehow 'more necessary' than WP:NOT. Nor is it valid to say that WP:NOT is 'more necessary' than WP:NOR and WP:V, for that matter. They're the rules, they're all important to Wikipedia in equal amount, and like 'em or not they're there to be obeyed (unless you subscribe to WP:IAR, of course, in which case rules discussion isn't likely to get anywhere anyway). Lord Bob 18:56, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
On the contrary. It is not true that "rules are rules are rules". I did actually see a discussion just a couple of days ago about whether WP:NOT is still needed. I am an IAR fan, so we'll disagree there. On the other hand, you still have not answered my other questions. [[Sam Korn]] 19:24, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
So there was a discussion. Splendid, discussion is good, but that does not mean that WP:NOT ceases to matter or loses importance just because some people don't like it. When the community's consensus is that WP:NOT hurts Wikipedia and it becomes one of the inactive rules, let me know (so I can cry). As for not addressing any of your other points, that's true, but it was outside the intended scope of my own response. My intent was not to tackle the cricket articles on their own merit, but merely to question your interpretation of the rules. I'm busy doing a lot of stuff right now and currently lack the time to counter all your points, so I just picked one that stood out. Lord Bob 19:33, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the least important one. I still maintain that verifibility is the most important part of the encyclopaedia. But no matter. Has anyone got any points against my statements other than Lord Bob's fundemental disagreement? [[Sam Korn]] 19:45, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My tuppence is that they should stay. I think we could all throw WP:NOT clauses at each other all day, but as the section says, what harm do they cause? They are verifiable and they have use in external research. Hiding talk 20:00, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I am still interested if anyone wants to counter my arguments. If you can't, I suggest we consider the matter concluded. Wikipedia should default to keep anyway. [[Sam Korn]] 20:00, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that given the lack of consensus we should keep these particular articles (although I think there is a consensus for not doing it in the same way again). But since you ask, I don't consider "what harm do they do?" to be a very good argument in general. On that basis, nothing would be insufficiently notable or the wrong type of information to include. If you're a hard-line inclusionist, fair enough, but that's not how I understand the community norms. Stephen Turner 20:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is we have little policy to guide us. They're not strictly speaking news reports as defined in WP:NOT. They are verifiable and are not original research. Therefore the default, as Sam Korn states above, is to keep, unless consensus forms to delete at WP:AFD. It basically turns upon one's definition of encyclopedic. Some will cite Wisden as an encyclopedia, therefore they are encyclopedic, others will deride them as sportscruft. At the moment there is no consensus, and this argument of what harm do they do is less an argument and more a correct placing of the burden of proof upon those wishing to delete. Hiding talk 21:40, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • What harm they do is mostly dilution of Wikipedia's reputation by disregarding WP:I. They also violate "not a free host", costing the project a bunch of not-paper. The intended future merge doesn't justify spending current time in article-space. It sounds more like an argument to move to user pages. Really, this should be going on in somebody's own computer and posted to a Geocities type of page. All that ought to be on WP servers is encyclopedic articles, drafts of encyclopedic articles if multiple editors are working on them, and Wikinews feeds on a league's championship (whether a big game or tournament finals or season standings). Not every game week-by-week for every sport's major league in every country. Not even just for a few weeks. Barno 22:52, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
    • [clears throat] ... oh, and rational policy discussions like this one, attempting to consider reasons and find consensus, ought to be on WP servers too. Barno 22:57, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • "All that ought to be on WP servers is encyclopedic articles". Well, that's just what we're debating, isn't it? Whether the actual content is encyclopedic or not. Basically, I would argue that since it is possible to write verifiable, NPOV content about individual sports games - even regular season games - the content should be kept. To take an example again - would anyone complain greatly if I mentioned in a coming article on Monty Panesar details of his standout performances in English cricket this season? Doubt it. So why is this content a problem when the details are written under the title of a particular competition or a particular team? (Note: I've pretty much gone away from arguing that matches deserve a single article - I just think the content is valid) Sam Vimes 06:42, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
        • Sam Vimes, I would not object to details in the Monty Panesar article but would (and do) object to the same information as its own article because it's just that: a detail. It has encyclopedic merit solely as information describing some other subject, but can't stand on its own as a subject. Encyclopedic Details and Encyclopedic Topics are distinct from each other, and I feel that sports results are a detail, not a topic. The Literate Engineer 14:10, 23 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
          • Right...I get that. And if you've seen my arguments all over this page, it's basically the same as what you're suggesting (even though I have been creating nearly 300 of these articles with details) - that they may well be merged into larger articles detailing the history of a team, and I have no objections to that, so long as most of the details are kept. Sam Vimes 14:21, 23 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
      • To your last point, well, um, yes. Did anyone disagree with that? May I ask who is really going to turn up at WP and think, "hmm, a cricket match. This encyclopaedia must be crap."? That's if they even find the things anyway. It's not as if there are links right, left and centre. The fact is that they are only harming the feelings of those with chips on their shoulders about sports results not being intellectual enough. Another fact is that these articles (if we are to define them as such) are far more notable than Pokemon. The basic argument about keeping Pokemon is "there's verifiable information, it doesn't really do us any harm, why not let the author write about what they want to write about?" I think the exact same argument applies here. My most important point, that the articles are soon to be merged, has still not been answered. I can only assume there is no answer to it. I am willing to be proved wrong. [[Sam Korn]] 17:08, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The "answer" to your argument about merging of articles has been made several times above, by myself and others, but I'll restate it here. It is twofold:
  1. Cluttering the Article namespace for an arbitrary temporary period is not necessarily better, or much different, than doing so indefinitely; the content of articles being worked on belongs in User space.
  2. Even when the articles are merged, the actual content is unencyclopedic and not appropriate content for Wikipedia. The discussion was framed as "Sports results", not "Individual articles about sports results", and while it focuses on the the individual cricket match articles as an example, the underlying question is whether Wikipedia should attempt to be a sports almanac or not.
For the record, I think the Pokemon-cruft and similar content is also not suitable for Wikipedia, but if there is a distinction it might be that the fan base for Pokemon is tens or hundreds of millions of people in a large number of countries, while the fan base for English league cricket -- not international test matches, remember -- is much smaller and more geographically limited. I personally would maintain a higher bar for obsessively detailed information on Pokemons and similar phenomena. -- MCB 18:04, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
How is it clutter? You have to go looking for these pages. They aren't linked from anywhere. Clutter is a page linked by hundreds of others, which is rubbish. "The content of articles being worked upon belongs in User space." Wikipedia is a wiki. All articles are being worked upon. Why should we deny ourselves a article in the mean time? To your second point, are you really saying that something verifiable, true, and not original research should be deleted? This isn't ever supposed to be news content. Some people want to have Wikipedia contain sports information. Why stop them doing that? If that's what they want to do, why stop them? It doesn't do any harm to Wikipedia's image or the content of the rest of the encyclopedia. By the way, we are discussing English championship cricket. League cricket is something different entirely. Remember this is a wiki. More than that, it's a website, so anyone can take what they want and leave the rest. Why not allow people to write about what they want to write about? Yours is a sure way to remove contributors. [[Sam Korn]] 18:21, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If it's valid to a select group of people, then it's valid, end of. --PopUpPirate 22:46, 21 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, no, that argument quickly disintegrates when you get things like List of bands with only men as members or People who have been accused of being gay (those were in AfD over the last few weeks; I don't remember the exact article titles). There is a reason for the guideline Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. You have to draw the line somewhere. --MCB 01:30, 22 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but there's a difference between huge, unmaintanable lists that are quite obviously never going to be complete and of very little research value, compared to a seasonal review of a team's performance, which may be a source for external research for people writing biographies about cricketers, journalists who want to know when Nottinghamshire last won the County Championship, that sort of thing. Your list examples can never be used as an external research, nor are they particularly interesting to read. Sam Vimes 06:19, 22 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
(Just a side note) Your point about usefulness for research is good, but whether or not something is interesting to read depends on the reader. Almost every reader here finds articles on both topics that they find interesting and topics that they find dull. --Idont Havaname 02:57, 25 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

AFAIK, the inclusion of these is supported by policy, and there is no policy which says they shouldn't be included. If you don't think they should be included, you need to push for a new policy, eg. Wikipedia:Importance. ··gracefool |☺ 14:45, 25 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New proposal: WikiBook it![edit]

After thinking about this for a while, and considering the opinions already presented, I don't have a strong opinion for inclusion or deletion of these specific articles, though if the pages are meant to be temporary, perhaps they should be marked as such with a template of some sort. My biggest suggestion, which hasn't been mentioned by anyone so far, is that this would be a very suitable topic for a WikiBooks project. So maybe for next season, a group of interested people could get together and make the Wiki English Cricket Almanac 2006 (or whatever). Then people deeply interested in cricket can get all the detailed reports from the almanac, and people writing encyclopedic summaries of the season or of specific teams can take source material from the finished almanac to use directly in Wikipedia. All these articles could include a template box up near the top that says something like "For more detailed information on the 2006 English cricket season, see WikiBooks:ECA2006". My personal thoughts:

Advantages:

  1. We don't end up with several hundred articles cluttering the Wikipedia namespace.
  2. No concerns about notability, since practically anything can go into the book, and people will only be taking the most relevant bits out to create Wikipedia articles.
  3. No concerns about WP:NOT, as I think an almanac is a fine WikiBooks project, whereas it's (at best) a controversial Wikipedia project.
  4. The almanac would still contain all the information necessary for anyone who wanted to do detailed research.
  5. More "official" (IMHO) than the alternate solution of putting all the relevant articles in User namespace.
  6. This same approach could be used by fans of any other sport that wish to include detailed summaries of every game. So there should be no worries about setting a bad precedent here. (I personally am concerned that someone will take the 2005 English cricket season articles exactly as an excuse to start trying to post detailed summaries of, say, every Major League Baseball game next year.)
  7. You get a nice "finished project" in the end, in the sense that your book can have an index, table of contents, and so on.
  8. Noone has to mention Pokemon! :)

Disadvantages:

  1. There are a lot more people who browse Wikipedia than WikiBooks, so maybe the cricket-almanac project will find fewer editors than they would otherwise. (This concern is hopefully alleviated by my suggestion to place a link to the project at the top of every 2006 cricket page.)
  2. Fewer eyes for the almanac project may also be a discouragement to the existing cricket editors. (We all want our contributions to be read!)
  3. There is the problem of pulling in information to Wikipedia from the book in an inconsistent manner; i.e., copying WP article text from different versions of the book, the fact that later edits to match summaries in Wikipedia may not propagate back to the book, and vice versa.

What does everyone think about this? To me, it seems a good compromise that addresses almost all of the concerns raised above, but obviously I may have missed something. If people from both "sides" think this is a good idea, it might be something worth strongly recommending for future seasons.

Colin M. 01:00, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't bad. People who are interested in the results would obviously be linked to Wikibooks from the Wikipedia article on the season in question, so people would know where the information is. I kinda like this, although I'm not sure what the Wikibooks crowd would think. If this ends up being what happens, it should probably be run by them first just so we don't have AfD War II on this. Lord Bob 18:30, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would be tossed off WikiBooks. "Wikibooks is not an in-depth encyclopedia on a specific topic." from Wikibooks:What_is_Wikibooks. They're aiming to create textbooks, not almanacs. So basically, if it's aimed to have an encyclopedic summary of the season, then it's not going to be on Wikibooks. However, I'm still to hear any good arguments against merging the pages into a full season review for each club and each competition, which I fully support and will probably need help to do from some friendly administrator when the pages are fully cleaned up. Sam Vimes 19:09, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
/me smiles sweetly. [[Sam Korn]] 19:11, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree that the current project has to be shunted off to Wikibooks in light of the fact that some people (not a consensus - SOME people) want it to be deleted. I think Vimes' compromise about making each individual result part of a larger page for each club, which will avoid "clutter" that so many people seem to be concerned about. User:Nach0king 10:50, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I hate to say it, but that has been the proposal all along. [[Sam Korn]] 10:53, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Moving it to Wikibooks is as good as deleting it - Wikibooks isn't about that sort of thing. A list of sports results and boxscores isn't instructional material by any stretch - so save the transwiki effort and just delete it outright. kelvSYC 17:11, 6 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps they should start a new sister project: WikiAlmanacs. —msh210 19:39, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

...or WikiTrivia. —msh210 19:13, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I think this is a very bad idea. Who is going to be able to keep track of wikipedia if it is cut up into little slices? It is much better to keep the whole thing in one place. Sumahoy 22:40, 6 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Closing the discussion?[edit]

This discussion has run for about a week, with a healthy number of participants. I have the feeling that pretty much all the arguments have been brought out. How do people feel about closing this and moving on?

As the creator of the discussion, my reading is that the discussion resulted in, truly, no consensus. Counting individual participants, I came up with 8 favoring deletion, 6 favoring inclusion, and 3 neutral/other. (By tradition, this is not a majority vote, and others may come up with different counts.)

Where do we stand? It seems unlikely to me that further discussion will result in any sort of consensus. MCB 20:53, 27 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I know what you mean.... keep the page though, it's a useful pointer when these things kick off again! --PopUpPirate 20:57, 27 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps if a larger group of the Wiki community were aware of this conversation we could find a less biased consenses. A vote of 9 to 6 (I vote remove) doesn't seem like it's had enough opinions to be valid. Will it be possible to draw more attention to the issue before you close it? --Jeff 16:42, 28 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to agree with Jeff above that this issue needs more eyes and shouldn't yet be closed. I knew of the cricket controversy (having stumbled into it briefly a month or two ago) and am a fairly active editor, but didn't find this discussion until today. In addition, I've just added a new proposal above and would like to see what people have to say about it. Colin M. 01:00, 29 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've placed my vote, but as I'm heavily interested in sport (not cricket, though, which I find to be tedious) I'll no doubt be regarded as biased. User:Nach0king 10:54, 1 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Great idea!! rather than delete the articles, move them to a seperate thing. this would be good for this type of thing. you could eventualy also include weather events and the such. -User:Chickendude

I think that 6 favouring inclusion is exagerated, as some agreed that single matches could be merged into a single [season] article. Mariano(t/c) 09:30, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

New proposal[edit]

The main article space should not be a container for sport results that plan to be merged into a future article. Rather, subpages are far more appropriate for this situation or organize several main articles and describe them as an on-going event. For example, if someone wanted the sport results of the cricket matches in England for 2006, while the season is going on, it would be far more appropriate to make an article called "Cricket Matches in England (2006 season)" or something of the like. Then use the on-going event template to title the top of the page. When the page overflows, as there seems to be many matches, branch the article according to either by team, or date, or whatever organization has been planned. The current approach seems to be that you write a sport result for a particular event then incorporate them into a higher level article. The planning and writing of an article should be rather reversed. It should start from a single article, then branch out to many articles, highlighting the important key matches, and separating out the minor matches. This is consistant for what we do for fictional minor characters. We don't have a page for every fictional minor character in Star Wars, but we have a collective page of fictional minor characters in Star Wars.

In short:

If a person wants to write one particular sport result that has no merit in expanding anything further than its own context, such as Asian XI v International XI 20 June 2005, then it should be moved to a subpage of a project or user page. They may, however contribute to a larger encompassing event, like the entire season of Cricket for the 2006 season. Then any match that is deemed minor is placed in a collective minor result page of Cricket for the 2006 season. Any match that is deemed critical may deserve its own article once the season article expands significantly further. Split the season match page to separate large encompassing sport results using some kind of organization like matches with this home team of the 2006 season, or by date, when the season match page is too large. --AllyUnion (talk) 23:50, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds fair enough to me... Sam Vimes 07:25, 8 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure what you mean by sub-pages. If you mean pages preceeded by / (Eg: wiki/Team_Season/game) please note that sub-pages are not encouraged in the article space. Articles in the aritcle space need to stand on their own as articles. If people are just working on a draft, they should do so in their user page area.
If they are working on a bigger article and re-writing it in summary style with smaller articles, then those smaller articles again need to stand on their own and comply with policy. Johntex\talk 16:11, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Plagarism and first-hand research[edit]

My worry about sports score articles is that they would be temptations to break Wiki's rules about Plagarism and first-hand research. I think this is true of anything where the Wiki article is going to read almost exactly like a newspaper article. If there is a sure-fire way to solve these two big problems, then I have no other objections, but I do think they're big problems. --Mareino 19:06, 9 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, and I think the fact that these will involve individual games will make it practically impossible to determine what is POV and what is not. These articles will be created on a mass scale, and I don't think there are enough people out there to manage it all. JHMM13 (T | C) 16:36, 12 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree, I see no reason these articles are more of a temptation than any other type on Wikipedia. As always, sources need to be cited and plagarism is not to be tolerated. There is no reason to harm our coverage of this field of endeavor based upon fears of possible abuses.

This issue is alive and well, and still causing a rucus[edit]

As per this discussion on WikiProject Football, there is still confusion about pages with sports match results. Many are being AfD'ed, some with result DELETE, some with result KEEP or MERGE ... WP needs (this is my perspective) a central policy/guideline to differentiate between encyclopedic articles about sports seasons, without violating the WP:NOT rule of indiscriminant information lists.

There's a proposed project, "WikiStats" or such (I prefer WikiSports to keep its domain defined and discrete), with related discussion HERE. Regardless of that slow boat, I feel WP needs a good yardstick to measure all these sports results pages against. Many, many editors are expending many, many hours of honest effort, thinking they're contributing to a better, brighter WP, but other editors are in opposition -- resulting in wasted effort, hurt feelings, and considerable strife. IMHO, naturally. David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:52, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • I was not involved in the original discussion pertaining to 2005 Criket matches. However, at the college football project we have discussed this and we are proceeding to create articles on individual seasons and even games so long as the are well written and comply with policy. Johntex\talk 16:07, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'd love to seen an example or two of "game articles" that you refer to. Of course, the AfD discussions I've seen were for page which were not an "article" in narrow sense, only tables of results and data. Over on WP:NOT there was healthy discussion to discourage "almanac" pages that were little more than just data/results. The alternative you're referring to sounds promising.... David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:17, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Here are two such single-game articles: 1985 Oregon State vs. Washington football game and 2006 Michigan State vs. Northwestern football game. Admittedly, both articles need more sources and a lot more work, but it is also pretty obvious that they are notable events that have verifiable details. There is also a category here that has more examples. I can't speak for their merits since I haven't read the articles listed there, but if they have been following the suggestions at the project then they should be good. z4ns4tsu\talk 15:01, 26 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Now that's what I call "an article," not indiscriminate info, or a just list of information. I hope pages like those can be held up as examples of notable events, covered in an "encyclopedic fashion." David Spalding (☎ ✉ ✍) 16:03, 26 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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